The world discards its surplus citizens

An office worker

Peter DaSilva / For The Times

Peter DaSilva / For The Times

John McCarron

The fortunate few and the idled many

Our problems are connected — and they're going to get worse.

Maybe I've spent too much time on the front porch rocker, but it occurs to me that a thread runs through the chaos that dominates the news this summer. Unseen yet increasingly undeniable, it's a tie-in that binds Chicago to Ferguson, Mo.; Central Africa to the Middle East; Afghanistan to wherever people are fighting for relevancy and respect.

This thread is not about race or religion. Those are factors, to be sure, but not the root cause of our unrest.

No, the fundamental problem is modernity itself, or more precisely, an emerging realization that the future doesn't really need us. Not most of us. Not to produce anything the world requires in return for a living wage. Much of mankind is, in effect, becoming surplus.

It's getting obvious, to me at least, that with precious few exceptions all the goods and services required by our new, high tech world already are, or soon will be, produced by a critical few. The rest of us — the idled many — are being relegated to the role of spectators, expected only to consume and pay taxes.

But how's that going to work? How are the many going to pay for anything without decent jobs? Government transfer payments, that is to say "welfare" in its many forms, cannot bridge the widening gap. And even if our politics would abide such transfers, which it will not, the psychological impact on non-workers, the anger and the frustration, would be unbearable.

In many places it already is unbearable.

In have-not locales like Ferguson, or desolate Chicago neighborhoods on the South and West sides, unemployment and welfare dependency are off the charts. Most of us only take note of such places when a cop kills an unarmed kid, or more typically when a kid kills another kid. But the real story is one of disconnection. These are places that have lost any function in the economic mainstream. And once productive work disappears, behavioral norms and self-respect aren't far behind.

Elsewhere in the world entire societies are similarly written off. The developed world, or at least the productive few in charge, has been functioning nicely, thank you, while those armies of bearded men roam the Middle East pointlessly brandishing assault rifles and rocket launchers. Oh, they'll disrupt an oil depot or two, but they aren't stopping the Standard & Poors 500 stock index from passing 2,000.

The fortunate few should not, however, be smug about any of this. The double-whammy of technological advancement and globalization of markets is chipping away at their ranks too. Advanced software and cloud computing are eating their way up the job chain, replacing professionals from radiologists to real estate agents. These are the structural, not cyclical, causes of the downward drift of wages over the past three decades. You didn't really think it was Obamacare, did you?

Evidence of the sea change is where you find it, which is almost everywhere.

This week it was reported that over a third of working Americans — 36 percent — have saved essentially nothing for retirement. Another new study shows the average Canadian family now has a higher income than its counterpart in the U.S.

Don't head for Toronto, though, because the rise of the few and the surplus-ing of the many is a worldwide phenomenon. And it's gaining momentum, as capital investment becomes ever more aggressive — and ruthlessly efficient — at seeking the maximum possible return. Seems the only way to get on the winning side of the trend is to own corporate stock — a lot of stock.

Or we could try as a nation — maybe even as a species— to make some adjustments in the way the global economy is unfolding.

But that's an awfully tall order and our politics aren't there yet. For now, better study some Mandarin, learn how to code and, above all, avoid getting surplused.

John McCarron teaches, consults and writes on urban affairs.

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